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CMA Capitol Insight: The Wheels of Progress Grind Slowly...

October 24, 2011

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CMA Capitol Insight is a biweekly column by veteran journalist Greg Lucas, reporting on the inner workings of the state Legislature.

The Wheels of Progress Grind Slowly...

Just under one month remains in the public comment period for an emergency regulation by the state Department of Public Health to increase the fee from $155 to $162 for screening pregnant women for genetic defects such as Down’s Syndrome or spina bifida. Begun in 1986, the program is the only entity permitted in California to conduct such testing. The department provides this screening to about 400,000 women annually. Boosting the testing fee by $7 is an emergency, the department says, because otherwise insolvency is imminent for the Prenatal Screening Program. Without the additional $7, the program would need to “suspend or reduce prenatal screening and diagnostic testing for pregnant women and their unborn children due to lack of funds, constituting an immediate threat to public peace, health, safety and general welfare.” That said, the department sent out a letter to doctors and hospitals way back in December 2006 that the testing fee was rising from $105 to $162. What they forgot to say was that they didn’t have the authority to tack on the final $7. Five years and numerous multiples of $7 later, regulatory resolution is in sight.

Speaking of Infants...

The department announced last week that California had a record low infant mortality rate in 2009, the latest year for which data is available: 4.9 deaths per 1,000 live births. That’s down from the previous low of 5 deaths per 1,000 births in 2006. Over the past 20 years, the high was 7.5 per 1,000, in 1991. Infant mortality is the number of deaths of Californians one year of age or younger. In 2009, there were 526,774 births in the state. Almost 2,600 infants died. Nationally, for which 2007 is the most recent year for stats, California had the lowest infant mortality rate among the 10 states with the highest number of births. At 8.5 deaths per 1,000 births, North Carolina, which had one-fourth the number of births as California, had the highest infant mortality rate. More troubling here at home is the disparity in mortality rates among ethnicities. While the infant mortality rate among African-Americans in California fell from 12.1 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2008 to 10.6 per 1,000 in 2009, that’s still 2.6 times higher than Caucasian infant deaths.

Still Pithy After All These Years...

Gov. Jerry Brown takes his writing seriously. This year, the democratic governor won the attention of lawmakers, lobbyists and the media for actually penning his own veto messages. In the messages explaining why he said “no” to 125 bills, Brown is terse, pithy, candid, acerbic, penetrating and a tad persnickety – sometimes all in the same epistle. On occasion, his self-control fails. Like urging that state policy makers “keep our powder dry” and not amend California’s handgun ammunition laws while their legality is being litigated. Brown’s penchant for polished prose is not a new phenomenon. For example: “This issue has been studied and studied and studied.” That one-sentence wonder was all Brown wrote in vetoing a bill mandating an appraisal of the availability of childcare. The measure’s author was GOP Assemblyman Jerry Lewis. Lewis has been a member of Congress since 1979. Brown vetoed Lewis’ bill in September 1976 – more than 35 years ago.

How About This One?...

”In an era of limits, hard choices have to be made about allocating scarce public monies. Although the objectives of the bill are good, I am not prepared to spend the money required in light of other budget demands.” Given California’s current fiscal woes, that could have been written a few weeks ago. Nope. 1976. It’s also eerie to read the governor warning about unfunded public pension liabilities that will ultimately be shouldered by taxpayers – more than three decades before it became the political issue du jour.

A Veto With Regrets...

The governor’s vetoes also offer windows into his personality. In one of this year’s offerings, he rues being forced to torpedo a measure that would have made it a misdemeanor to picket funerals within one hour before the funeral begins and one hour after it concludes. The bill is in response to the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. Founded by Fred Phelps and consisting mainly of his extended family, the church protests homosexuality and other things it opposes at funerals. Fairly explicit signs are used. The church entered the national spotlight in 1998 when it picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming youth beaten to death because of his homosexuality. In 2006, brandishing signs saying “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and "God Hates Fags," church members picketed the Westminster, Maryland, funeral of U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq. Snyder’s father, Albert, sued for invasion of privacy and emotional distress. A trial court awarded him $5 million but the judgment was reversed by an appellate court which held that the church was protected under the First Amendment “notwithstanding the distasteful and repugnant nature of the words." In March, the United States Supreme Court upheld the appellate ruling. The high court said the church’s actions were not unruly, occurred on public land more than 1,000 feet from the services and, in sum, the protesters “had the right to be where they were.” Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s most conservative members, was the lone dissenter. "Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case,” he wrote. The bill Brown vetoed attempted to ban such funeral protests but do so without violating the court’s edict.

What Brown Wrote...

”This measure seeks to address the offensive conduct of those who protest at private funerals to gain publicity for their causes, and I am very tempted to sign it. When I was the Attorney General, I joined an amicus brief in the Supreme Court arguing that funeral protesters should be held accountable to their victims. But earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that funeral protests are protected by the First Amendment and can be circumscribed in only extremely limited ways. I cannot in good faith sign this measure because it plainly fails to comport with the Supreme Court's decision.”

This Knockoff is a Knockout...

Mouse, that is. The cheese-craving kind with four paws, whiskers and a tail. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) just handed out $110 million to launch the second phase of its Knockout Mouse Project, which takes the acronym KOMP. Some $34 million of the total will be delivered to the University of California at Davis, which was also the developer of a PET scan and CT scan for mice. Knockout mice are so named because each of them has a particular gene knocked out of them, either replaced or disrupted through an artificial piece of DNA. Because 99 percent of human genes are shared with mice – including ones to grow a tail – researchers can better understand what a gene normally does by preventing it from doing so. That gene’s absence can change the behavior or appearance of the mouse and—one of the drawbacks of knockout—kill the mouse about 15 percent of the time. During its first phase, the NIH project created embryonic stem cells for 21,000 mouse genes. The aim of the second phase is 5,000 strains of knockout mice for use in testing. Normally the mouse model carries the name of its knocked out gene. However, there is a “Frantic” model for use in studying anxiety disorders and “Methuselah” for longevity issues. Methusaleh, by the way, lived to the age of 969. He begat Lamech at 187, says Chapter 5 of Genesis. Adam only made it to 930.

Strange Synonyms...

The curse—or beauty—of the Internet, depending on perspective, is that a search for more information about “knockout mouse” also leads to the discovery of, among scads of other stuff, “sockdolager.” Obscure in origin, the word sockdolager came into usage in the early part of the 19th Century and means “something that settles a matter,” “a decisive blow or answer.” Like a knockout punch, apparently. A form of the word is contained in the biggest laugh line of the comedy, Our American Cousin:“I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologizing old man-trap." As the audience at Ford Theater on April 14, 1865 roared in response, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head.